American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Both sides had reasons to be nervous. For the Americans, the Chapman attack stood as a testament to the consequences of misplaced trust. For his part, Agha relied on German promises that he wasn’t walking into a trap that ended at Guantanamo. Inside the house, Agha changed into his Afghan salwar and introduced the Americans to a Qatari delegate who had traveled with him. “You Americans have your German friends with you,” he said, “and we Taliban want to have our Muslim friends from Qatar with us.” Ruggiero and Hayes didn’t argue the point. Only later, however, did Holbrooke, Rubin, and the rest of the team learn that German and Qatari diplomats had been meeting for months to arrange what was, in fact, a co-mediation.

  The meeting began with each side reading statements. Agha’s was deeply critical of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and the injustice of holding the Taliban responsible for 9/11, a crime it neither planned nor committed. The Taliban, he said, are not terrorists. Ruggiero defended the American and NATO response in 2001, but conceded up front that the war was a stalemate. Now, the U.S. wanted peace to come from the Taliban and Karzai’s government reconciling on their own terms. In six hours of dialogue over the course of two days, Agha said that a prisoner exchange was one of Omar’s highest priorities. There would be no problem delivering Bergdahl from the Haqqanis, he said, because the Haqqanis and the Taliban were one and the same.

  Barney Rubin was flying from Washington, D.C., to Kabul on the same day that Ruggiero flew home from Germany. Rubin was headed to Afghanistan in part to brief General Petraeus, and he needed to know what had transpired in Munich. Holbrooke was eager to know as well, so all three met for an impromptu meeting at Harry’s Tap Room in the main terminal at Dulles International Airport, where Ruggiero devoured a burger as he recapped Agha’s top lines and the next steps.

  He told them that there were serious obstacles to overcome. On the question of the Taliban’s relationship with al-Qaeda, Agha had been vague. His plans for reconciling with Karzai were equally noncommittal. But both sides had agreed to fulfill a series of confidence-building measures, and the prisoner exchange would be one of the most critical steps toward mutual trust.

  Meeting adjourned, Rubin checked in for his flight, Ruggiero went home, and Holbrooke went back to the office. The secret peace process had consumed Holbrooke. His critics saw it as naked ambition, daydreams of a Nobel Peace Prize. But Rubin saw the man who recruited him as driven by a more relatable fear. Holbrooke had confessed to him that he didn’t want to end up like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, with his legacy defined by the historic magnitude of his mistakes. Eleven days later, Holbrooke was with Clinton at the State Department when his face flushed red and he announced that “something horrible is happening.” In the ambulance, he continued dictating messages for work. Rubin was back in Dubai for a regional conference when he heard that Holbrooke had died.

  Before the holiday recess, Congress passed an updated National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual legislation that sets the Pentagon’s budget (and the attached congressional strings). For 2011, the bill passed with bipartisan approval for a critical amendment that took direct aim at Obama’s pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. After seven years of regular detainee transfers under the Bush administration, the 2011 update mandated that no more would be released without the full prior consent of the Pentagon and Congress.

  Washington hard-liners had their own methods of derailing the peace process. To Rubin and NSC officials dedicated to resolving the conflict, the sudden NDAA change looked like Washington politics at its worst. The same transfer process that had released 532 detainees during the Bush administration would now be tightly managed by congressional Republicans. Obama had been outmaneuvered, and as he signed the NDAA into law on January 7, 2011, he undermined the promise he’d made on his first day in office to shut the prison camp—and lost the best available option to bring Bowe Bergdahl home.

  SIXTEEN

  BOB’S WAR

  Bob and Jani’s lives were now fully intertwined with the U.S. government’s fiasco in Afghanistan, their son’s fate to be determined by the same convoluted calculus that had led the White House to triple the size of the war while simultaneously planning its end. In the November 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon, Karzai and his ISAF backers agreed that Western troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014; the war had been put on a four-year schedule. In Idaho, Bob and Jani coped through prayer and counsel from their expanding network of Vietnam POWs, Afghanistan policy experts, former hostages, pastors, and for Bob, a tight crew of cyclists who joined him for weekly long-distance bike rides that doubled as foreign policy seminars. Five mornings a week, he put on his brown UPS uniform, a polite smile, and walked his deliveries through the glass doors on Main Street in Hailey, Idaho, all of them bearing the same yellow ribbon sticker framing his son’s smiling face and the message:

  “CAPTURED IN AFGHANISTAN 6–30–09—PLEASE HELP FIND ME.”

  The stickers had been sent by Keith Maupin, whose son Matt Maupin had also been an Army private when he was captured by insurgents north of Baghdad in April 2004. When Keith first called Bob and Jani in the summer of 2009, it had been more than a year since his son’s remains had been found in Iraq, marking the end of his own ordeal and a tenacious four-year lobbying campaign. Maupin told Bob that he would do whatever he could for them as they endured their similar nightmare. Over the course of five years, he printed about sixty thousand of the yellow-ribbon stickers that would become ubiquitous in Southern Idaho and in POW-MIA chapters nationwide.

  The winter and spring of 2011 had led Bob to even greater doubts about U.S. capabilities in the FATA, and a deeper understanding of the power structures that blocked access to his son. “My theory was the U.S. (kind of) controlled the Pakistani military, the Pakistani military (kind of) controlled ISI, and ISI (kind of) managed the Haqqani Network,” Bob wrote years later. “(Kind of) simplistic, but more or less true.” On January 22, 2011, a front-page New York Times story by reporter Mark Mazzetti followed up on his earlier bombshell about Michael Furlong with a front-page exposé about Clarridge’s Eclipse Group and the ongoing struggle for intelligence dominance in Afghanistan. His story—“Former Spy with Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A.”—made it clear that the seventy-eight-year-old Clarridge was still capitalizing on chaos.

  In describing Eclipse’s rogue network of pseudo-spies running amok on both sides of the Durand Line, Mazzetti’s story had again served the CIA’s strategic purposes. One week later, as if by karma, the CIA stumbled into its own flap.

  Raymond Davis was a former Army Special Forces soldier turned CIA contractor when he shot and killed two men in Lahore in broad daylight. As an angry crowd circled the scene, he triggered an emergency signal to his CIA handlers, who, fearing an international crisis if Davis was arrested, sent an extraction team to rescue him, which, in its haste, accidentally ran over and killed another Pakistani man en route. Davis was detained for nearly two months before the matter was settled with a $2.4 million payment from the U.S. government to the families of the deceased. (Such blood-money payoffs, known as diya, are legal under Pakistani Sharia law.) The families pardoned him, and Davis walked free. Bob and Jani couldn’t believe it. “We saw what could be done, if they wanted to,” Bob said of the backroom deal. “If you’re a CIA Blackwater mercenary, you get the red carpet extraction.”

  As the CIA and White House scrambled to contain the Davis fallout, Holbrooke’s sudden death had left the State Department’s SRAP office briefly rudderless. Hillary Clinton worked her way through a list of potential replacements, eventually hiring Marc Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey during her husband’s presidency. A tall, kind-eyed man with a professorial demeanor, Grossman had been heartbroken by Holbrooke’s premature end. He had known him his entire career, since Grossman first joined the Foreign Service with a freshly inked diploma from UC Santa Barbara in 1976. Thirty-five years later, Clinton asked him to come
back from a lucrative private sector job to take over Holbrooke’s quixotic mission.

  On February 14, 2011, Clinton announced Grossman’s return to the State Department, and Ruggiero and Hayes arrived in Doha for their second sit-down with Tayeb Agha and Michael Steiner, the German envoy who had replaced Mützelburg. They met at a private compound provided by the emir of Qatar. At their first meeting in Munich, Agha had told the Americans that he had traveled to Germany without Mullah Omar’s knowledge. In Doha, for the first time, he said that he was negotiating with Omar’s direct blessing and authority.

  At the White House, one of the Conflict Resolution Cell’s first and highest priorities had been identifying who was actually authorized to negotiate on behalf of the Taliban, and who was just a con man. Days before the first meeting in Munich, a story broke in the press about an Afghan who had convinced ISAF officials that he was one of Mullah Omar’s closest associates. The Fake Mullah, as he would be known, had been toying with British and U.S. intelligence for months, complete with an ISAF security detail that escorted him to and from high-level meetings, for which he had been paid more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash before he suddenly disappeared.

  Jeff Hayes was certain that Agha was not an imposter. “We knew we were dealing with the real guy,” he said. What he, Ruggiero, and Rubin didn’t know was how much influence Agha actually had within the Quetta Shura, or with the Haqqanis and other hard-line Taliban factions. The Americans asked Agha if he could produce proof that Bergdahl was alive and well. If he followed through, it would clarify the Taliban hierarchies and bolster the chances of a prisoner exchange.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE NIGHT OF May 1, 2011, President Obama was in black tie and owning the room during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton. Donald Trump was in the audience, and as Obama mocked the man who would eventually replace him about the weighty decisions he dealt with as the host of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, only a handful of senior White House officials heard the joke behind the joke. Earlier that day, Obama had ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Hours later, jubilant crowds swarmed the streets around the White House after Obama delivered a brief live television address from the East Room:

  I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.

  Obama’s vague language raised instant suspicions. Abbottabad is home to Pakistan’s premier military academy. The notion that the ISI had been taken by surprise, as they claimed, hardly seemed plausible.

  Bob and Jani watched from Idaho as bin Laden’s death triggered mass protests in Pakistan, where politicians decried the violation of their national sovereignty. In the moment of American exultation, the Bergdahls feared that a vengeful ISI officer would order the Haqqanis to kill their son. Bob had to do something. He drafted a statement, combed his hair and beard, put on a black shirt, and on May 6, with the last snow of the heavy winter lingering on the hillsides behind him and a yellow ribbon tied in the branches of an aspen tree, he spoke directly to the men in control:

  I am the father of captured U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl. These are my thoughts. I can remain silent no longer. I address the Pakistani armed forces.

  I personally appeal to General Kayani and General Pasha. Our family is counting on your professional integrity and honor to secure the safe return of our son, and we thank you. . . . Our family knows the high price that has been paid by your men in the Army and in the Frontier Corps. We give our condolences and thanks to the families of those who have fallen for Pakistan.

  Strangely to some, we must also thank those who have cared for our son for almost two years: Mullah Sangeen, the Haqqanis, and the others who have played a role in sheltering the American prisoner.

  We know our son is a prisoner and at the same time a guest in your home. We understand the rationale the Islamic Emirate has made through its videos. No family in the United States understands the detainee issue like ours. Our son’s safe return will only heighten public awareness of this. That said, our son is being exploited. It’s past time for Bowe and the others to come home. To the nation of Pakistan, our family would wish to convey our compassionate respect. We have watched the violence of war, earthquake, epic floods, and crop failures devastate lives all while our son has been in captivity. We have watched your suffering through the presence of our son in your midst. We have wept that God may show his beneficence, his mercy, and that his peace may come upon the people of Pakistan. Assalamu alaikum.

  We ask that your nation diligently help our son be free from his captivity. I pray that this video may be shown to our only son. Assalamu alaikum. God bless you. We love you. We’ve been quiet in public, but we haven’t been quiet behind the scenes. Continue to be patient and kind to those around you.

  You are not forgotten. You are not forgotten.

  The video lasted three minutes and nine seconds. Before he posted it to YouTube and sent it to Tim Marsano at the Idaho National Guard for distribution, Bob shared it with his pastor in Boise to make sure he hadn’t violated church doctrine. He also cleared it with Admiral Mullen, who assumed that Bob had been coached by the FBI, was astonished that he hadn’t, and promised Bob that he would hand-deliver a written follow-up message to General Kayani at their next meeting. Two days later, the Taliban released a proof-of-life video of Colin Rutherford, a Canadian citizen also held by the Haqqanis in the FATA. The Rutherford video was the same three minutes and nine seconds. Bob and Jani tried not to tie their hopes to speculation, but this seemed like more than a coincidence, and a sign that someone had heard their plea.

  The day after Bob posted his statement to YouTube, the American negotiators, Tayeb Agha, and his Qatari representatives returned to the Munich safe house where they had first met five months earlier. As the talks entered a phase of gridlock over the prisoner exchange, Agha shifted topics to the Taliban’s desire for a physical office; they had chosen Doha as their only viable option.

  After the Saudis’ diplomatic implosion, Qatar’s then emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, saw little downside to hosting the Taliban office. The Qatari royal family had cultivated an aspirational foreign policy for years; diplomacy was a chance to match and even exceed the stature of its larger competitors in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Hosting five aged Taliban veterans and their families was not a high price to pay for the prestige that closing the deal would bring. Later that summer at another meeting in Doha, Agha delivered a letter for President Obama, allegedly written by Mullah Omar, pressing for the prisoner exchange and assuring that the released Taliban would live out their days in peace.

  Back in Washington, Lute’s Conflict Resolution Cell couldn’t agree on the most basic elements of the conflict, much less a deal to free the highest-ranking Taliban in U.S. custody. David Sedney and his Pentagon colleagues suspected that Agha was simply using the pretense of diplomacy to spring his comrades from Guantanamo, and as much as Sedney respected Barney Rubin as a historian and scholar, he saw the process that he and Holbrooke had begun as flawed from the start. Still, Grossman had the authorization he needed, and in August 2011 he flew to Doha to meet with Agha personally, a gesture intended to convey Obama’s seriousness. But when Grossman reiterated the White House’s preconditions, Agha dodged those issues and pressed his case for trading Bergdahl for the Guantanamo Five.

  Bob and Jani first learned about the State Department’s proposed prisoner exchange in a private briefing that summer. The broad outlines had been declassified to SECRET for their knowledge, but specifics were left out when Bob was in the room. (Intelligence officers and analysts had grown a bit wary of Bob’s hunger for detail.) Agha delivered a new proof-of-life video in October, proving his sway over Siraj Haqqani and his ability to fre
e the American soldier. It was a major breakthrough, and the White House started moving quickly; Lute dispatched Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson to travel to Doha to hammer out the terms of an agreement with the Qataris.

  At a November meeting in the Situation Room, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, along with Ruggiero and Rubin, briefed a wider group of senior officials, including Homeland Security Adviser John Brennan, Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell, and ranking lawyers from the State Department and the NSC. Despite Pentagon and CIA analysis that the Guantanamo Five would try to rejoin the fight, the group agreed that the five men, headed to an air-conditioned retirement with their families under Qatari surveillance, posed a minor threat. The next, and they agreed harder, challenge would be getting the plan through the gauntlet of American politics.

  * * *

  —

  BARNEY RUBIN’S BRIEF GOVERNMENT experience had proved just how far outside of the Washington mainstream he was. Even at the State Department, where he made his first hesitant suggestions that releasing prisoners from Guantanamo could be a constructive step in the reconciliation process, officials looked at him as if he were insane.

  “It was incomprehensible to them,” Rubin said. Two years later, with his once-crazy ideas put into motion in the Situation Room, the passage of time hadn’t made them any more popular. He reminded his colleagues about how the Taliban leaders had ended up in Cuba in the first place. “None of those five guys ever fought the United States. Three of them surrendered, and two of them we detained after they showed up for appointments saying they wanted to help us,” Rubin said. These facts didn’t seem to matter. “The conventional wisdom was, ‘These are the worst of the worst.’” For years, every person he encountered in the national security establishment was against releasing them.